yourself your own feelings if, on looking out of your luxurious carriage, you suddenly perceived that the lines upon which you ran were rusted and corroded, red and yellow with disuse and decay!  What a catch must have come in their breath as in a second it flashed upon them that it was not Manchester but Death which was waiting for them at the end of that sinister line.  But the train was running with frantic speed, rolling and rocking over the rotten line, while the wheels made a frightful screaming sound upon the rusted surface.  I was close to them, and could see their faces.  Caratal was praying, I think—­there was something like a rosary dangling out of his hand.  The other roared like a bull who smells the blood of the slaughter-house.  He saw us standing on the bank, and he beckoned to us like a madman.  Then he tore at his wrist and threw his dispatch-box out of the window in our direction.  Of course, his meaning was obvious.  Here was the evidence, and they would promise to be silent if their lives were spared.  It would have been very agreeable if we could have done so, but business is business.  Besides, the train was now as much beyond our controls as theirs.

“He ceased howling when the train rattled round the curve and they saw the black mouth of the mine yawning before them.  We had removed the boards which had covered it, and we had cleared the square entrance.  The rails had formerly run very close to the shaft for the convenience of loading the coal, and we had only to add two or three lengths of rail in order to lead to the very brink of the shaft.  In fact, as the lengths would not quite fit, our line projected about three feet over the edge.  We saw the two heads at the window:  Caratal below, Gomez above; but they had both been struck silent by what they saw.  And yet they could not withdraw their heads.  The sight seemed to have paralysed them.

“I had wondered how the train running at a great speed would take the pit into which I had guided it, and I was much interested in watching it.  One of my colleagues thought that it would actually jump it, and indeed it was not very far from doing so.  Fortunately, however, it fell short, and the buffers of the engine struck the other lip of the shaft with a tremendous crash.  The funnel flew off into the air.  The tender, carriages, and van were all smashed up into one jumble, which, with the remains of the engine, choked for a minute or so the mouth of the pit.  Then something gave way in the middle, and the whole mass of green iron, smoking coals, brass fittings, wheels, wood-work, and cushions all crumbled together and crashed down into the mine.  We heard the rattle, rattle, rattle, as the debris struck against the walls, and then, quite a long time afterwards, there came a deep roar as the remains of the train struck the bottom.  The boiler may have burst, for a sharp crash came after the roar, and then a dense cloud of steam and smoke swirled up out of the black depths, falling in a spray as thick as rain all round us.  Then the vapour shredded off into thin wisps, which floated away in the summer sunshine, and all was quiet again in the Heartsease mine.